George Russell wrote in to inform us of the KHTML port to AtheOS. "The main focus for V0.3.5 [of AtheOS] however has been on the KHTML-based web browser. I have ported the HTML parser/renderer used in the Konqueror web browser (KHTML) to AtheOS. KHTML is a very capable HTML parser and renderer that supports both CSS and javascript, and so does the AtheOS web browser. Finally, a high-quality web browser for AtheOS! The browser is part of the 0.3.5 base install and the 0.3.4->0.3.5 upgrade archive." Now that the dust from the slashdotting has settled, you can actually check out the screenshot (dot mirror). This has not been the first, and undoubtably, it is not the last port of KHTML to strange new platforms. So huge kudos go out to the Konqueror/KHTML developers, and all those people out there who helped shape this resource.

What about NetPositive? What about the "K" being infront of every KDE app, Windows in front of almost everything in windows and G/ Gnome in front of all Gnome apps. Anyway, i don't really care about the name, i care more about the features etc.

It's good to see this, but I could not understand if it uses qt, for what I can tell not.
So if it's true, is it possible to port khtml to win/mac etc? Because there will be not restrictions because of QT license.

What I did was to first remove everything that didn't compile from Qt-X11 (ie. all the GUI classes) and kept all the classes that did compiled (most of the tool classes like containers, strings, filesystem API wrappers, etc etc). Then I started compiling KHTML. Whenever I got a " not found" error I added a dummy header file with an empty class and when I got Qxxxxx::blabla() not defined I added a dummy member to that class. After a while I had a totally useless but compiling and linking version of KHTML. Then I started to fill in the functions. Most of them ended as very small functions that just called into the native AtheOS GUI toolkit. This aproach made it possible to keep much of the KHTML code unchanged while still get as close to "native AtheOS" as possible (no ugly X11 in framebuffer hack or something like that). It also means that the Qt version I ended with only support exactly the classes and functions used by KHTML so it is not a full port. Also in a very few cases where it would have been a lot of work to emulate the Qt semantics of something but very easy to modify KHTML to use a more native-AtheOS method I did modify KHTML instead. I did try to modify as little as possible though to make it as simple as possible to upgrade to newer versions of KHTML

Many thanks to the KHTML team for making such a great piece of software!! Most OSS sources are a total mess but KHTML was very enjoyable to work with.

I haven't tried AtheOS yet, but I get the impression that it will be very big in a few years. There aren't many people like Kurt who have the the skills to code a complete OS almost from scratch. Much kudos Kurt!

Yes - for sentimental reasons I use to boot my good old Amiga 1200 once a year, and still it feels much faster and responsive than for instance this dual PII 450Mhz with 256 meg RAM and KDE 2.

Of course, the comparison is not really fair : the Amiga has an *accelerator card* with four megs of *fast ram* and a *double speed* (28Mhz) CPU. This gives it a 32% better MHz/MB ratio than the hog I'm using right now...

The server is now back up. Unfortunately a filesystem got corrupted last night and the server went down :( I noticed that it was gone and tried to ping some of the other machines on our network from home and none of them responded so I concluded that the entire network was down and that some network dude would make it all work again. When I got to work this morning the network was indeed working but the server was dead and I had to rebuild a filesystem to make it work again.

Not really. It might be possible, but it would go against the philosophy of AtheOS, which is to make a completely new, "clean" OS from scratch, including all the GUI stuff. A port of KDE wouldn't use AtheOS to its full potential unless KDE was modified to support it, which isn't likely since KDE needs to be cross-platform. The AtheOS way is just to implement everything themselves (perhaps borrowing some code like KHTML where appropriate, but not copying an entire interface)

For example, AtheOS has file attributes like BeOS. To really have file attributes work well, they must be supported by all applications. No KDE apps use file attributes. Konqueror wouldn't allow you to see or change them. An AtheOS port of KDE would have tons of problems like this.

Is this a joke?
There is a completely new Kernel (which actually works, has some drivers and has a pretty neat modular structure, no need for recompiling if you just need a new driver), a completely (kinda) new 64 bit journaling file system and a completely new Desktop and a GUI API (already featuring AA fonts, etc) which is almost as matur as KDE 1.0 (as you state).
This all was done by ONE person. No patches, no shared work, just ONE person (not because noone wanted to help, but because this person prefers to code it's own ideas atm) and you really ask, if this is moving slowly?? :)

Easy there, bud. I just haven't followed AtheOS development very closely. I honestly had no idea how many people were working on the project, and how fast it was going. However, your recent "post" didn't really answer my question on how fast development was going.

BTW: I hate to say this, but I don't think that a kernel that can add new drivers is special. In my opinion, it is necessary.

> However, your recent "post" didn't really answer my question on how fast development was going.

So how should I answer this one to your satisfaction? Development is going at 200 mph? ;) Seriously, I didn't follow it for a long time but I get the impression, that everything is coming along very nicely and fast. The API is already usable, now it needs a lot of driver developers to get some more hardware working. :)
The IDE driver will be especially important, cause it will also allow easy cdrom installations (atm you have to use bootdisks and such).

> BTW: I hate to say this, but I don't think that a kernel that can add new drivers is special. In my opinion, it is necessary.

I would agree. That's why I'm not very satisfied with Linux anymore and looking for an alternative. HURD is promising, but AtheOS seems to be much further in development.

Before someone gets me wrong:
It's because I can't install new binary drivers for my special kernel, not because it's impossible to add drivers. :) I just think that it's not very convenient to have to compile a new kernel, if I want to add a new closed source driver. That just sucks.

Comments? That the guy running www.atheos.com kinda screwed up. He have ripped the entire front-page from my server (at www.atheos.cx) without bothering to change essential information like this. He even left my email-address address at the bottom of the page even though I have never been involved with www.atheos.com.

Yesterday night, I got the new konq-embedded from Simon's Website and compiled a new netraider version. I'm very very impressed by the progress of KHTML. :) I didn't work on Netraider for months, but finally got interest again.